


The Long and Winding Road (To Your Door)

by ambitiousbutrubbish



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: (honestly though this is mostly just a character piece about patrick), M/M, not exactly internalised homophobia more like internalised not-thinking-about-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 15:53:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18607708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambitiousbutrubbish/pseuds/ambitiousbutrubbish
Summary: Patrick is pretty sure he’s the only one who finds the holiday cards the Roses send out to their employees to be oddly charming.





	The Long and Winding Road (To Your Door)

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to have this finished before we met Patrick’s family so I could just make up my own backstory for him, but I wasn’t even close. Here it is anyway because why not?

Patrick gets his first job at Rose Video when he's 13. Legally speaking, he’s far too young. But it’s a small town and they pay in cash and nobody is going to say anything. Everyone knows his family needs the money. They’re close; his parents and his aunts and uncles and his cousins and all of them. They look after each other as best they can. But more than once Patrick has heard his dad crying to his mum about having to borrow money off his brothers. Patrick’s job doesn’t pay much, but every little bit counts, especially if he wants to go to college one day. 

It was a fine job, as far as jobs go. Mostly he spends his time there putting the movies back on shelves or sitting behind the counter reading. He gets through more books in the first month at his job than he had in the year beforehand. Sometimes he’ll watch the movie that they’re playing on the screen hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the store, but by and large they show the most blandly inoffensive rom-coms that they stock in-store, so Patrick soon finds himself staring off blankly into space whenever he tries. 

The customers that do come in ignore him for the most part. Most of them are in their late teens or early 20s, and he’s not exactly in the age bracket that they would think his opinions are worth hearing. But every now and then parents will come in and ask him for recommendations for their own kids. He’s developed a pretty good list of what people might want to see just based on what those parents tell him their kids like when they ask for a suggestion. At the start he’d drawn up a nice little flow chart to keep track, but it had soon become unmanageable. 

In Patrick’s third month in the job, his boss wanders out of the back room in the middle of the day when the store is the quietest, and leaves the bookkeeping on the check-outs desk before he stalks out the front door, grumbling something about balancing the books and lunch. When he doesn’t come back in five minutes and the store is still empty, Patrick flips the book open.

It takes him about an hour to figure out, but now he knows what he’s doing, he’s pretty sure he could do it much quicker next time. Patrick has always been good with numbers. When he was little his dad would take him to hockey games and he would get bored before they were even half way through, so his dad would distract him by getting him to add up player numbers. Patrick was doing long division years before the other kids in his grade. Even these days when he will more than happily sit through a double header and still want more, Patrick will find himself playing little maths games with the numbers of the players in a scoring chain in the back of his mind. 

His boss comes back almost an hour later again. They’ve had maybe two customers in that time so it doesn’t really matter, but Patrick still feels it’s irresponsible to run out like that. He keeps his opinion to himself, though. Only mentions that he’s had a look at the books himself and he thinks he’s figured out the problem. And that’s how Patrick ends up with an unofficial pay rise to go with his unofficial job. 

********************

Patrick is the only one at the store who takes home the holiday cards that the Roses send out to all their employees. He doesn’t keep them, but he does put them with all the other cards he gets in a pile in his room until he throws them all out together. 

His coworkers openly sneer at them when they arrive. Most think of the cards as a waste of paper or some soulless capitalist ploy. A couple find them downright offensive, a rich family rubbing their expensive lifestyle in their employees’ faces. Patrick finds it weirdly charming, how out of touch the Rose family is. They wear all black in every picture, no matter the occasion. Patrick doesn’t think he’s seen a single smile on any of their faces, and they seem determined to somehow occupy a corner of the photo each. And yet despite the seriousness of each image, they radiate such an air of , _ridiculousness_ that Patrick can’t help but smile indulgently every time he picks one out of the box they’re sent in and shoves it in his bag.

HIs own family doesn’t do personalised photos on any of their cards. His mom considers it a frivolous waste of money, and instead she buys the cheap 20 pack of generic cards. Some of them are blank, but most have some bland holiday greeting printed inside. All of the Rose’s cards have a typed message, the words essentially the same in each one except for the name of the holiday changed. Even the signatures of the family are photoshopped in at the end, and not well. Mr Rose’s is particularly fuzzy at the edges. 

Patrick keeps the cards on the top of each pile every holiday, and he looks at the photo on the cover whenever he needs to lift his spirits. The boy - David - in particular always looks especially committed to the whole vibe the family is projecting at the camera, not even a splash of colour on his clothes, his face honestly comically serious.

Patrick wonders if he would crack a smile if he sent them one of the cards from his mom’s pack.

********************

One of Patrick’s uncles gives him a guitar for his 15th birthday. He had never asked for one, so Patrick figures it must have one belonged to one of his cousins who got bored of the instrument. It’s also probably too large for him, his hands and fingers straining to reach back to the first fret. Patrick goes to the library to find _anything _that could help him learn guitar which is how he finds out about the capo, but he doubts he could buy one of his own. There isn’t the faintest whiff of a music shop for miles and miles. Instead he stretches as far as he can and hopes the tendons in his hands forgive him later.__

__Patrick is good at music in the same way that he is good at math, and not just the rhythm. Music just makes _sense_ to him, the sound of it, the pulse of the beat. He figures out how to play a couple of simple pieces just by listening to recordings and fiddling around until it sounds right to his ear, and then he starts trying to learn some songs._ _

__He’s on the porch of his parent’s house attempting to pluck out something that sounds a little like the opening to _Blackbird_ when Patrick first meets Rachel. Her family is new to the town and she’s walking by his house when he attempts the slide up the neck for the fifth time and falls just short again. She pauses just in front of him. “That sounds nice”, and he stops playing and smiles at her._ _

__Patrick has never really had a girl be interested in him before, and Rachel is smart and nice and almost endearingly tone deaf. She watches baseball with him pressed up against his side and she has dinner with his family, and she listens to him play the guitar with her head tipped back and her eyes closed and a smile on her face. When Patrick had thought about having his first girlfriend he was always so nervous that he felt like he would be sick, his stomach feeling like it was sitting somewhere around his knees. But with Rachel it’s just so easy to go with the flow._ _

__And when she kisses him it tastes like cheap lip gloss, and when she holds his hand he thinks that this is how his life is supposed to go. And he doesn’t feel nervous. He doesn’t really feel much of anything at all._ _

__********************_ _

__In his third year working at Rose Video they get sent Labor Day cards, and David changes his hair._ _

__Patrick didn’t even know Labor Day cards were a thing. He still doesn’t think they actually are, but he’s glad the Rose’s seem aware of that. His eyes are drawn to David straight away. He’s still wearing the black that seem to be almost a uniform for these family photo opportunities, but there’s something different about his hair. And it’s not just the fact that it looks like it was cut by someone who either had their eyes closed or their head tilted to one side the entire time. The light are hitting him just right, and Patrick can see that David’s hair is distinctly dark blue._ _

__It’s distracting, and it takes Patrick a few moments to realise that Alexis isn’t even on the card. To be fair it’s not the first time that she’s been missing, but it is the first time that it’s twice in a row. Patrick wonders what that says about the family dynamic, that Alexis skips out on photos, and David is there for every one without fail. What it says about David, having no one but his family to spend the holidays with._ _

__********************_ _

__Patrick has his first real sex dream about David Rose. He’s had the dreams before, but then they are mostly just impressions; hair, hands, sounds all lingering like an echo once he wakes. But this dream he remembers vividly. This time it’s _David’s_ hair, _David’s_ hands, the little sounds coming out of _David’s_ mouth even though Patrick has never heard him even speak before, and he wakes up with a start and a heavy, sticky feeling in his gut; ripped out of his dream with his breath lodged in his throat._ _

__He feels hot all over; almost light, trembly. He closes his eyes again and lays there for a few moments, not sure if he’s trying to forget his dream or fall back to sleep and chase it. Eventually he rolls out of bed and stumbles towards the shower._ _

__He’s pretty sure it’s normal to have those sorts of dreams about the people that you’re close to. Things get all muddled up when you’re asleep, your unconscious shooting off all kinds of thoughts and colliding them into each other. It’s perfectly natural that something like this would happen. He’s never actually met any of the Roses in person, that’s true. But he has as good as watched David grow up through the multiple photos he sees of him through the year, and he does feel like he knows him, in a way._ _

__Three days later, Rachel breaks up with him for the first time._ _

__********************_ _

__Patrick goes to college out of town, which means quitting his job. His manager gets a little teary-eyed when he tells him, which would be sweet if Patrick wasn’t sure it’s because he’s thinking about the fact that he will have to do his own bookwork now. Even so, Patrick will miss the job. They never treated him like a little kid._ _

__There's a Blockbuster Video between his new student accommodation and the nearest supermarket. He walks past every few days but he can’t bring himself to go inside, like some strange ex-employee-induced brand loyalty. He’ll send Rachel in to hire something, if they’re in an on-again phase of their relationship. Otherwise he becomes ignorant of movies in a way he hasn’t been since he was 13 years old, and he shoves his brain full of accounting facts instead._ _

__He doesn’t go home for Christmas. Rachel is there and they’re broken up again, and either way he can’t really afford the drive at the present moment. His parents have planned to come up on Christmas Eve to stay with him for a few days, but he has some time to himself before that and he uses it to better acquaint himself with the area._ _

__Patrick finds a Rose Video tucked down in a little side-street nowhere near the path he usually takes to buy groceries. Inside it’s much the same as the one in his hometown, albeit bigger; the rows and rows of VHS tapes and DVDs, the tiny TV screens hanging from the ceiling, the apathetic teen behind the counter using the computer. He grabs a couple of movies without really looking at what they are and gets out of the store. He hasn’t really suffered from homesickness since he moved away, but something about being inside a Rose Video makes his chest feel tight._ _

__There’s a rubbish bin just outside the store, and he catches a glimpse of the inside of it as he’s walking passed. Right on top is a picture of the Rose family, looking comically seriously up at his with ‘Merry Christmas’ emblazoned underneath. Patrick walks home as fast as he can, with tears in his eyes._ _

__********************_ _

__Patrick doesn’t like conflict. He never has. He’s competitive - with sports, with grades, with things that don’t really matter in the long run - but conflict runs the risk of exposing his vulnerabilities, and of him blurting out something that he isn’t ready to say._ _

__Which is how Rachel always gets him to take her back. Patrick doesn’t think she’s taking advantage of him on purpose. He knows her and he does love her in a way and he knows she’s not that kind of person. But he gives in so easily every time she confronts him that he’s pretty sure she thinks that he just likes rolling over for things, that he’s letting her make the decisions about them getting back together so that he doesn’t have to admit he was wrong or something._ _

__It’s not _entirely_ untrue. He does let her make the decision because it’s easier. Because if he’s caught up in their relationship drama then he just doesn’t have the time to really explore how he really feels about her, about _everything_. Never has the chance to explore anything else._ _

__And it continues for years. Too many years. So many years that he forgets, almost, what it’s like to not be confused or frustrated or unfulfilled. He forgets that he really did love Rachel once, that they had fun together, that she made him laugh._ _

__Until he breaks off their engagement and gets in his car and drives and drives and finally takes charge of his life._ _

__********************_ _

__David, when Patrick meets him, is _difficult_. He’s scattered and easily flustered and so, so convinced that he doesn’t deserve happiness. He deflects from anything with even the hint of emotional vulnerability like _that_ is his job, and not the brilliant, thriving store that he created and keeps running. _ _

__Because when he focuses, David is so smart and so driven and Patrick wants to tell him that constantly, every day, but he knows he’ll run if he does. So he keeps it to himself._ _

__He keeps it to himself that he recognised David the second that he walked into Ray’s office, even though he hasn’t seen so much as a picture of him in years. He never went back to Rose Video after that first time. He never returned the movies. He still doesn’t even know what ones they were, and he left them behind, shoved in the back of his closet when he moved out. There’s probably some symbology in that. But still, he saw David and he _knew_ it was him, just from the way he holds himself. _ _

__So he keeps it to himself and he invests in David’s business and he tries to do the best he can to show him that his ideas are _good_ , that they’ll work and that David _deserves_ for them to work. _ _

__And if Patrick comes to a few revelations of his own about what _he_ deserves at the same time, then maybe it’s about time._ _

__In the end, it’s easy for him to be patient with David. After all, he’s had to be so patient with himself._ _

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone who says out loud that they are a “take charge guy” had to have come to that stance the long way around.


End file.
